July 2004
A. Thomas McLellan, Ph.D., has spent most of his career researching the effectiveness and quality of substance abuse treatment, while working to reduce the stigma attached to addiction. After his own frustrating search for an effective substance abuse treatment for a family member, McLellan founded a research center -- Philadelphia’s Treatment Research Institute. Now, he will use funds from a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation “Innovators Combating Substance Abuse” award to develop health care policies that encourage doctors and other medical practitioners to look for and respond to symptoms of substance or alcohol abuse as complicating factors in common medical conditions and diseases.
Launched
in January 2004, McLellan’s PRISM project will provide research
grants to NIH-funded, career clinical researchers whose work is focused
on any one of several chronic diseases (currently breast cancer, hypertension,
sleep disorders, diabetes) to enable them to consider the effects of alcohol
and/or other drugs in the onset, course, management and outcomes of that
chronic disease. Protocols integrating medical, psychological, personal
and social management will be disseminated to health care providers. Ultimately,
McLellan hopes to develop a series of evidence-based clinical and administrative
practices for adoption by the medical community that will dramatically
improve treatment standards in both medicine and substance abuse.
“Too often, doctors, nurses and paraprofessionals are not trained
to detect symptoms of substance abuse that can exacerbate common ailments
or diseases,” says McLellan. “Our goal is to educate healthcare
practitioners to understand that co-existing problems of substance abuse
can frustrate and attenuate (and make more costly) medically prescribed
regiments of care, and to develop integrated plans for managing drug-
or alcohol-involved patients with other medical problems”.
McLellan and four others were named 2003 “Innovators” as part of a national program of The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation that rewards those who have made substantial, innovative contributions of national significance in the field of substance abuse. Each award includes a grant of $300,000, which is used to conduct a project over a period of up to three years that advances the field. The program addresses problems related to alcohol, tobacco and illicit drugs, through education, advocacy, treatment and policy research and reform at the national, state and local levels. The Innovators program is run by a national program office at The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine
Dr. McLellan is co-founder and Executive Director of the Treatment Research Institute and Director of its Section on Substance Use and Healthcare where the PRISM project is housed.
For additional information
on the Innovators Combating Substance Abuse program, please visit the
Web site: www.SAInnovators.org
